"Blog Art" Article in USA Weekend Inspires Publicity & Blogging

[BarneyDavey]

USA Weekend, Gannett Corporation's Sunday newspaper supplement, ran a two-column article titled Blog Art - It's the latest way to find affordable, original paintings in its August 12 edition. With a circulation of more than 23 million, the lucky artists mentioned surely enjoyed increased traffic to their blogs from the publicity. (As an aside, I contend publicity is the single most powerful element artists can unleash to promote their work. This is a perfect example. If the story was pitched by a publicist or a mentioned artist, kudos are in order.)

The article is also in the online edition. Read it here: http://www.usaweekend.com/07_issues/070812/070812blogart.html The online version doesn't have the graphics in the print edition, but it does have the three artists' blogs hyperlinked.

I admit garnering publicity at this level is a long shot, but it shows what is possible and more likely done on a local or regional level. I would use this story to help pitch a similar story about my blog to editors on my publicity rolodex. If you don't have such a contact list, perhaps this will encourage you to begin one. You'll find most worthy articles bylined, cut them out and save them, put them in a contact file and start getting ready to use them. If you need help, pick up a copy of Susan Abbott's Fine Art Publicity (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1581154011?ie=UTF8&tag=printmarketpr-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1581154011).

Need help writing? Then try Gramlee (http://www.gramlee.com/). For $9.95 you can get up to 2,000 words professionally edited in about two hours. (If you use less words, you have the rest banked for future use.) I tried it in its free beta stage and was very impressed with the quality and speed. I can't praise this affordable editing service enough. Magazine and newspaper editors are always on tight deadlines. As such, they naturally are preferential to PR pieces they don't have to rewrite for their publications. If English is a second language or writing is not your forte, you'll love this service. I guarantee you'll have greater success with professionally written materials.

If you have been on the fence on whether to blog or not to blog, I trust this Art Print Issues blog post will help you decide: Why Every Artist Needs a Blog. (http://barneydavey.blogs.com/printmarket/2007/03/why_every_artis.html) You will find it contains useful links to excellent sources and practical advice to get you started right.

I believe notoriety on blogging and art blogs in particular in such mainstream media as USA Weekend enhances artists' ability to touch and find collectors directly. IMHO, blogging is simply the best and most convenient and personal way for artists to seek and influence collectors regardless of their location. This will improve as blogging's explosive growth continues. Producing a well done blog and generating meaninful frequent publicity and will give you the makings of a marketing machine to take you far.

I realize there is more to a successful career than a blog and few nicely placed articles, but when well executed these things simply add jet fuel to a career. I say this because if you are organized and driven to do these things, then other important things are usually tended to as well. The adage, "If you want something done, ask a busy person" is apropos.

It's not too late at all to start, and it's easier than you think. There is so much supportive talent available right here on this board, even the greenest computer neophyte should be able to quickly figure out how to get started. Search the threads here and then post a question if you can't find an answer, aid is only a few clicks away.

[ElizaLeahy]

There are so many blogs out there - I have one on LiveJournal and errrr - others that I never update. Do you think one blog is better then another? I keep up the LJ one because I get the most response, but it's only other LJ users and rarely brings in any customers (has once or twice in small sales).

[mLee]

blogger seems to attract a lot of artists and art buyers. I think it is important to update regularly and to connect with your readers. I got serious about blogging in June and I noticed a huge increase in traffic and sales.

http://mleeprints.blogspot.com/

[onefinepint]

Thanks for posting the links to the article. I saw the article on Sunday and was wishing I had an electronic form of it.

[timelady]

I think with LiveJournal that you have to register to leave a comment? I seem to remember not leaving comments for just that reason. On Blogger you can leave an anonymous comment at least. Eliza, also check out the thread I had on Feeds/RSS - I learned a lot and have more hits now that I did it. I've also noticed a significant increase in hits to my blog, website, and one of my online galleries now that I'm consistently blogging daily. It's kind of a pain some days but I save blogs as drafts when I have a few ideas at once then go in and publish them on different days! (remembering to change the time/date setting from the date of the draft)

I copy my blogs to a Blogger and MySpace blog and my stats show a lot of hits to my other sites from Blogger, but not from MySpace.

Tina.

[BarneyDavey]

Unfortunately, there are no free lunches. A blog infrequently updated with little or no marketing will not draw much traffic. You have to create something of interest. Part of that is finding your voice. Do you want to just talk about your art? Do you want to be professional and formal? Would you be more comfortable being casual and informal? Do you want to discuss topics not related to art? What other interests do you have that synergize with your art and your art career? Do you have an interest in music, spirituality, politics, animal rights, human rights, Web 2.0, and on and on.

An musician whose blog I greatly admire is Christine Kane. She uses her blog to help promote her CDs and concerts. But, because her interests are greater than being a musician, her blog is rich with ideas on living a better life and more. She has taken this interest to the point of doing sold out workshops and retreats to help women. Check it out: www.chrisinekane.com/blog. You can download a free song while you are there.

Want more traffic, get known. Post on other blogs, put your blog address on every correspondence you send. Create a Squidoo (http://www.squidoo.com)Lens. Have it on your business cards. Try to use keywords in your title and body copy that will help people find you. For instance, if you are doing fantasy art, then include those words or similar words as frequently as possible without creeping your copy out in the process.

Here's a link to 25 Tips to Marketing Your Blog (http://www.toprankblog.com/2006/06/25-tips-for-marketing-your-blog/). Some of the suggestions are beyond beginning blogging with free software, but are still usefeul and something to consider for the serious blogger. Want to get really serious, check out http://trishjones.com/. The Internet is full of great free advice, do some Googling to find more helpful sources.

[Katherine T]

Barney - we have had a blogging resources sticky thread (http://www.wetcanvas.com/forums/showthread.php?t=265364) at the top of this forum for a long time now. It's an excellent place for people to start in relation to the nuts and bolts of blogging. The only thing that people wanting to read this need to bear in mind is to make sure they read through it slowly when they've got a bit of time to spare. A lot of the concepts are very new and strange to people new to blogging and reading about how we all struggled with them at the beginning can also be very comforting.

I've been blogging since January 2006 and virtually every day for very nearly a year and I can highly recommend the impact frequency has on stats. For one thing IMO Google doesn't take you seriously until you've got 50,000 page views (that's the number of pages people look at when they visit). I'm basing this view on my own experience.
Up to 50,000 it can be a bit of a slog (so make sure you blog about things that interest you).
After 50,000 growth has been exponential for me. Google starts to adjust your blog's page ranking and that in turn has an impact on the placement of individual blog posts. Mine now has a page rank of 5 and gets lots of hits from people searching on keywords.Lastly, my own blog stats are going ballistic today because this morning I posted a post called "How do I find things to blog about". As I suspected, for most people it would appear that having a blog is a great deal easier than knowing what to put on it and people are very keen to know how to make life easier for themselves.

[CSForest]

Ok, what exactly is Squidoo? I've seen several people mention it. I looked at their site a bit but don't quite understand what it's about.

[bepos]

I'm very new to blogging and find this information very helpful-thank you.

Katherine-I just looked at your blog and find your ideas very interesting. I was excited to see that I may be on the right track with my blog by choosing to do a project. :)

[Katherine T]

Squidoo is something that was started by Seth Godin who is one of the movers and shakers in the web 2.0 world

This is the wikipedia explanation of squidoo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squidoo).


Squidoo is a website (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website) launched in October 2005 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005). It is a platform (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform) designed to make it easy for anyone, for free, to set up a single page on a topic he or she knows or cares a lot about. Squidoo came out of beta testing in March 2006.
Squidoo is a network of user-generated lenses --single pages that highlights one person's point of view, recommendations, or expertise. Lenses can be about anything, such as ideas, people or places, hobbies and sports, pets or products, philosophy, and politics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics). Lenses aren't primarily intended to hold content; more emphasis is placed on recommending and then pointing to content on the web. Annotation and organization and personalization delivers context and meaning.


It has really excellent connections with Google. I've been amazed at how quickly a squidoo lens shows up in Google. Plus I note wikipedia finishes with
According to Alexa, Squidoo's traffic has grown more than 40% monthly beginning in the spring of 2007. It is now in the top 500 of all websites tracked worldwide.

Essentially lenses are a way of organising information for specialist topics - a way of cutting through the rubbish you can get on keyword searches. It is also possible to use them as marketing vehicles - so for example a number of people use them to market/sell their art work although I don't do this in any overt way (eg although my artwork is included) so can't comment on this option - . One that does very well is the EBSQ squidoo lens (http://www.squidoo.com/ebsq/)

I've found using squidoo is a really great way of organising my links and also sharing them with other people. Plus when your computer goes through a crash and burn your favourite links are all saved! (Guess why I did it in the first place? ;))

[Katherine T]

The other thing worth noting is that of the three people mentioned in the article Jamie Grossman is a Moderator on Wet Canvas (JamieG) - you'll find her over in Artwork from Life and various other forums.

Jan Blencowe is also a WC member and has written in this forum before now about art and blogging.

Maybe Barney or Tina would like to invite them to comment on this thread?

[CSForest]

Squidoo is something that was started by Seth Godin who is one of the movers and shakers in the web 2.0 world

This is the wikipedia explanation of squidoo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squidoo).



So sort of a "MySpace" type thing but more customizeable ... and better organized?

[Katherine T]

Sort of - take a look around at the lenses which exist is probably the best way of getting acquainted with what they can do and how they can look.

This is the link for the top 100 "Arts & literature" ones (http://www.squidoo.com/browse/top_lenses/topic/2) - and be prepared for an awful lot of low brow and fluff - except for mine of course! ;)

Christa - there's quite a lot of animal ones - i think a wildlife art one might well get some interest.

[surreal]

Unfortunately, there are no free lunches. A blog infrequently updated with little or no marketing will not draw much traffic. You have to create something of interest. Part of that is finding your voice. Do you want to just talk about your art? Do you want to be professional and formal? Would you be more comfortable being casual and informal? Do you want to discuss topics not related to art? What other interests do you have that synergize with your art and your art career? Do you have an interest in music, spirituality, politics, animal rights, human rights, Web 2.0, and on and on.

An musician whose blog I greatly admire is Christine Kane. She uses her blog to help promote her CDs and concerts. But, because her interests are greater than being a musician, her blog is rich with ideas on living a better life and more. She has taken this interest to the point of doing sold out workshops and retreats to help women. Check it out: www.chrisinekane.com/blog. You can download a free song while you are there.

Want more traffic, get known. Post on other blogs, put your blog address on every correspondence you send. Create a Squidoo (http://www.squidoo.com)Lens. Have it on your business cards. Try to use keywords in your title and body copy that will help people find you. For instance, if you are doing fantasy art, then include those words or similar words as frequently as possible without creeping your copy out in the process.

Here's a link to 25 Tips to Marketing Your Blog (http://www.toprankblog.com/2006/06/25-tips-for-marketing-your-blog/). Some of the suggestions are beyond beginning blogging with free software, but are still usefeul and something to consider for the serious blogger. Want to get really serious, check out http://trishjones.com/. The Internet is full of great free advice, do some Googling to find more helpful sources.


Hi Barney,

Thanks so much for posting!
I appreciate the very helpful information that you provided.

I have my reading cut out for me.

[BarneyDavey]

This thread is about publicity and how to get it. I would be remiss if I didn't show you that I walk my talk. I was featured with a cover story in the July/August issue of Great Output (http://barneydavey.blogs.com/printmarket/2007/08/barney-davey-fe.html) magazine. It goes to 20,000 photographers. It came about due to my comments on the LexJet Great Output blog. If I waited for the publication to find me, it would have never happened.

Use what you have to make things happen for yourself. Use the terrific results Katherine T here has garnered for her blog as a model and inspiration for what you can do for yourself. BTW, :clap: :clap: Kudos and Congratulations to Katherine for recently passing the 100,000 unique visitors number to your blog. That is an awesome achievement. Before the Internet and blogging, the cost to reach and infuence that many highly targeted people was probhibitively expensive. This is a good time to be an artist who is willing to work at the marketing side because the available tools are so readily available and helpful.

[clintavo]

There are some great suggestions here - absolutely you must blog about something that matters to you - I read somewhere that you must be willing to write to an audience of one - because, at first, you may have only a few or even one reader. If you persist, as Kathrine mentions, traffic will grow. It's important to post regularly and build up a big catalog of past posts - these become indexable material by the search engines. I am amazed sometimes at the keywords people use that led them to my blog to posts that are months in the past.

I've also learned that blog posts can be great fodder for email newsletter articles. I often write about a subject in a blog and later flesh it out into a full-fledged email newsletter....by the way if you don't use an email newsletter to promote yourself, then start...right away - in my opinion it's hands down the best tool for marketing...especially marketing to your hottest prospects: people who already know who you are.

But the key thing to remember is that your blog, should you choose to have one, is for generating traffic, for exploring topics of interest to you, and for fostering a conversation with your prospects....but when it comes time for a sale - you should have a web site or online gallery portfolio.

I think about it this way:

A web site is analogous to a gallery - a place for information about the artist and a place to view and purchase art.

A blog is analogous to having a conversation with the gallery owner.

Their both important and both needed...but different.

[hillrune]

blogger seems to attract a lot of artists and art buyers. I think it is important to update regularly and to connect with your readers. I got serious about blogging in June and I noticed a huge increase in traffic and sales.

http://mleeprints.blogspot.com/

Your blog is irresistible! of course it has helped your sales! :D

[CSForest]

blogger seems to attract a lot of artists and art buyers. I think it is important to update regularly and to connect with your readers. I got serious about blogging in June and I noticed a huge increase in traffic and sales.

http://mleeprints.blogspot.com/

How do you know what your traffic is? I know it shows how many have viewed your Profile but I don't know if there's a place on Blogger where you can see how many visits you've had to you blog's front page. Is there?

[BarneyDavey]

Clint, Welcome to WC! I subscribe to your blog and find it quite informative. Your experience and insights will be a great addition to this board.

Hillrune, I agree with you completely, Marissa's blog is irresistible. Crafting gorgeous inventive fine art from woodblocks in a sea of giclees certainly helps make it so.

Christa, here's an article you should read. Actually everyone interested in blogging can likely make reviewing this list worthwhile. It's called, Free Essential Tools for Blogger Blogs (http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2005/04/free-essential-tools-for-blogger/). It was written in the blogger stone age of April 2005, so some things may have changed, but the concepts and resources are still invaluable.

[JoeKaz]

How do you know what your traffic is? I know it shows how many have viewed your Profile but I don't know if there's a place on Blogger where you can see how many visits you've had to you blog's front page. Is there?Setup Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/) and you'll get some great statistics on who is visiting your blog. The setup is simple - you'll need to insert a short javascript just before the </body> tag in your blog's template. You many need to wait a day for it to start reporting statistics, but after that, you'll have a lot of great information. And it's free.

[JoeKaz]

... I copy my blogs to a Blogger and MySpace blog and my stats show a lot of hits to my other sites from Blogger, but not from MySpace.
I don't know how valuable FaceBook is for exposure, but I recently signed up and it has one really nice feature: you can give it the rss feed for your blog (or anyone else's) and it 1) imports all of your past posts, 2) automagically imports any new post you make to your blog - they appear in your 'notes' section which other friends can view. Like I said, I'm note sure how useful this will be, but, it's a one time setup and then it maintains its self, so it seemed worth a try for any chance of additional readership.

[RobinZ]

I tried blogging a while back and just couldn't think of enough to say about myself, it was embarrassing!! I'm kind of a private person. I also work a little slow, especially now that I work a daytime job, so the art - a - day thing wouldn't work for me.

Then I thought I could devote my blog to rescue organizations since I do dog portraits, but they just totally overwhelmed me, it was crazy! I ran and hid!

But inspired by Barney's post, I thought of one that I could do more infrequently, that I would find interesting, and that might be more than a blatant plug for me....yet ties in with my work...and here's my start! What do you think?

http://allanimalsart.blogspot.com

[hillrune]

But inspired by Barney's post, I thought of one that I could do more infrequently, that I would find interesting, and that might be more than a blatant plug for me....yet ties in with my work...and here's my start! What do you think?

http://allanimalsart.blogspot.com

I like it! sounds like fun too :clap:

[Katherine T]

Christa, here's an article you should read. Actually everyone interested in blogging can likely make reviewing this list worthwhile. It's called, Free Essential Tools for Blogger Blogs (http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2005/04/free-essential-tools-for-blogger/). It was written in the blogger stone age of April 2005, so some things may have changed, but the concepts and resources are still invaluable.In general, people need to be aware that anything written about Blogger before the move to New Blogger could be redundant.

While this is a good summary of some of the tool which are useful, I think most of them are in fact mentioned in this forum's very own 5 star rated Blogging Resources thread (http://www.wetcanvas.com/forums/showthread.php?t=265364) which is a sticky thread at the top of this forum. That provides a lot more practice and detailed information about how to use such tools.

[blondheim12]

I have found that blogging has expanded the possibilities for me. I am also a cartoonist as well as a landscape painter and I was a chef and caterer at one time as well as an artist. I have lots of interests that relate to art and I have found the combination of blogging about restaurants, cooking and food art to be a wonderful combination. This theme led me to a new blog I have created called Linda Blondheim Art Notes. It is a combination of stories about being from the South, the food we eat, our quirks and good Southern restaurants and the process of being an artist. It is much more casual than my Landscapes Of The South blog with painters tips. It is more personal, and I find that people like it. I plan on using the blog as a loose outline for a book on cooking, travel, and art in the next few months. It is a fairly new blog compared to my other one but it seems to be collecting a few viewers.
Love,
Linda